Two conversations I recently had that seem to shed some light on race in Quebec:

A Québécoise woman in my choir carpool was describing an interaction she recently had with a stranger who was black. It was a row over a parking space. “I never get on well with black people,” she says. “They’re always so standoffish. It’s like they think we’re all racists or something, they think we don’t like them, so they don’t like us.”

Two weeks later, I’m at a launch party for an African affairs conference, and I start talking with a middle-aged, male doctoral student from the Central African Republic. “I have very few white friends,” he says. “They’re always so standoffish. It’s like they think we’re all racists or something, that we don’t like them, so they don’t like us.”